Hair-raising hairpins in the van of dreams

Hijab mural, Skardu
Originally uploaded by rtw2007.

Currently, our life is pretty simple: wake up amid beautiful mountain scenery; drive along the river through more mountain scenery; stop for a dirt cheap and very tasty lunch; drive a bit further; then stop to go for a walk / chat to the locals / eat a delicious dinner. Really, it’s tough. Can’t imagine why we ever gave up work…..

Northern Pakistan really is spectacular. The only problem is that we can’t quite show it off properly in our photos because the valleys are so vast that we end up just taking a fraction of the view in each image. We just can’t quite capture the whole scene as it is in real life. And whilst it sounds like a huge cliché, the people are just unbelievably hospitable, welcoming and friendly. We get invited to people’s homes for tea several times each day. When we drive along, the vast majority of the pedestrians wave at us and many of the truck divers blow their comical sounding horns and look down on us with a big grin.

We spent a few days in Karimabad, wandering up to the fort and looking around town. Michael was delighted to find that one of the hotels had been taken over by the Serena chain since his last visit, so he was able to eat the Ginger Chicken Handy which he has been raving about for the past two years after he last had it at the Serena in Gilgit. The hotel management were happy for us to park the van in the best spot in town, overlooking their manicured, terraced gardens full of flowers and fruit trees and with views right over the valley and the surrounding peaks. The only slightly odd thing was that it all felt a bit colonial: we found ourselves sitting in white canvas deckchairs on the terrace overlooking the gardens, being served English Breakfast tea in white china cups. Tally ho.

From Karimabad, we went to Gilgit via a brush with a landslide, caused by some recent heavy rain. It was a bad one: they had been trying to clear it for three days without success and the Pakistani trucks were forming huge, colourful tailbacks on both sides of the blockage. There was a route around for cars and buses, but when we saw it we felt slightly nauseous. It was one of the tracks that we have kept looking at from the KKH and wondering how on earth anyone ever gets down there. A narrow dusty path with lots of hairpin bends (which at times was only millimetres wider that our van), led to a rickety old bridge. There were no weight limit signs, of course , so we just had to trust the locals who we were giving a lift to (we are a regular taxi service around here) that it would take our weight. The bridge waved worryingly in front of us as the van crept onto it: think Indiana Jones but in Pakistan and with a two ton van, though thankfully fewer baddies and snakes. Actually it was no-where near as glamorous as that, particularly when we climbed up the other side and found that the road had turned to deep mud. Of course we got stuck. No problem, though, because we are in Pakistan. Immediately, the minibus behind us stopped and out jumped around twenty men and boys in shalwar kameez, all of whom pushed the van through the mud until we could reverse down onto flat land, get a bigger run up and have another go. Michael managed to get the van to the top in one piece, after some scary sloshing around in the mud on the way up. Everyone cheered and said, “Welcome to Pakistan” repeatedly; then we all got back in the van and headed off through some villages, down to the river again, across another rickety bridge, and eventually back onto the KKH with a huge sigh of relief.

On arrival in Gilgit we discovered that it was a prophet’s birthday, hence a public holiday. The locals had strung lights up all over town and the mountain sides were dotted with Urdu words written in firelights, which stood out brilliantly against the dark sky. It all looked really spectacular and distracted us from the slightly tense atmosphere in the town (it has historically been unsettled here and there are a large number of police / soldiers on the street corners with hard hats and machine guns). We ate dinner in the restaurant of the hotel were we had parked, but unsuspectingly happened upon a wedding celebration, to which we were immediately invited. It was an odd affair to our western eyes: the men were inside the hotel and didn’t really talk very much, whereas the women were all outside in the garden having a much better time. There was no mixing at all and the bride and groom didn’t talk to each other during the evening. I was escorted to sit in pride of place with the bride on a throne-like chair overlooking the whole festivity. Given that I was still dressed in the same mud-splattered T-shirt as I had been wearing when the van got stuck earlier (whereas all the other women were in their finery of beaded and embroidered shalwar kameez), this was a little embarrassing. But they all seemed pleased to have foreigners there and whipped out the cameras and home video for lots of footage of us smiling and trying to say congratulations in Urdu.

The only odd thing here is the lack of women in everyday life. The bazaars are entirely male; all the waiters are male; so are all the shop assistants. We have only seen one set of women with jobs so far, and that was in a women’s carpet weaving co-operative set up by an NGO. In the Hunza Valley, at least, women do walk around the villages, but in Gilgit and here in Skardu there are just no women on the streets at all. It really does take some getting used to and it means that I get lots and lots of stares. Except for one bigoted bank manager, though, all the men have been perfectly friendly. They just ask lots of curious questions: two of the most common are (i) is ours a “love marriage” (as opposed to an arranged marriage) and (ii) why don’t we have any children. But then at least we haven’t encountered the views of anyone like the Chief Minister of Sindh (a neighbouring district), whose words were plastered all over the newspapers here yesterday: “A woman’s rule is a curse from which one should protect oneself”. Erm, yes.